For Samsung, a flash storage provider and maker of SSDs, snapping up NVELO broadens the electronics giant's opportunities in the increasingly competitive flash storage market.

Samsung's executive vice president of Flash Device Solutions, Young-Hyun Jun, said in a company statement, "The acquisition of NVELO will enable us to extend our ability to provide SSD related storage solutions to customers. We are pleased with this transaction as the employees of NVELO share our vision to take SSD storage into the next-generation of performance and reliability."

Statements made by NVELO CEO Jiurong Cheng hint that Samsung is ramping up its efforts to boost enteprise SSD sales by targeting the burgeoning application acceleration market.

"We look forward to accelerating storage innovation in close cooperation with Samsung storage experts as we help to deliver fully integrated SSD solutions to the market," stated Cheng.

Samsung isn't the only SSD maker pursuing a strategy that combines flash technology with software that harnesses its ability to speed server workloads, particularly as Big Data processing and analytics are gathering momentum in the enterprise technology market.

SanDisk's fixation with supercharging databases continued this summer when it bought Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Schooner. Schooner's Membrain software is a multi-threaded, flash-optimized implementation of memcached, an open source distributed memory caching technology used to improve the performance of database-driven applications.

SanDisk clearly aims to bridge the gap between commodity servers outfitted with SSDs and pricey in-memory analytics platforms like those from Oracle and SAP. During the deal's announcement, SanDisk stated that "Schooner's ability to combine DRAM and flash memory seamlessly in a single solution offers near-DRAM performance at a lower cost."